As background to our new series on big data and machine learning, which will be published later this week, readers may want to check out this VentureBeat article on “deep learning,” a field still in the early stages of development even though products like Google Street View incorporate it. Click on the paragraph link for
Sramana Mitra: How did you convince your first couple of customers to go with you? Omer Artun: They were people whom I helped as a consultant. Once I built up trust with them, I told them I could do what this other vendor was doing for them much cheaper and better. That is how I
Sramana Mitra: What e-commerce systems do they work with? Omer Artun: This doesn’t matter to us. It is a rest API. Any e-commerce system can pull the data out of it. If you think about the day in a life of a marketer, we are trying to do other things than just starting up recommendations
Sramana: What is your market reach? Lon Otremba: We are consistently running 10 million unique players a month. That is growing rapidly. We had 8 million just three months ago. The trajectory we are on now is one that we hope will provide us with 30 million monthly players by January or February. Sramana: How
Sramana: Where did your journey go after Muzak? Lon Otremba: After I left I joined New York Angels and I was looking at a few other situations where I could be a good fit. In the mean time I became an investor and board member in both Internet media companies as well as medical technology
Sramana: Once you realized that the large corporate environment of a place like Procter and Gamble was not for you, what did you do next? Lon Otremba: I was offered the opportunity to get into the media business with a company that published trade magazines. It was an opportunity to sell magazines and make more
Sramana: Lon, let’s start with the background that leads up to the Tylted story. Where are you from? Lon Otremba: I grew up in Michigan. I am an identical twin and I was part of a family that was involved in the automotive industry. My father spent 38 years with the same company. My uncles
I have been watching the trend for a while … the amount of outsourced business being transacted on the various services exchanges around the world is HUGE. We have done story after story on this trend. Here is a summary of the links: eLance, oDesk, Freelancer.com & vWorker (these two have recently merged), CrowdFlower, CrowdSpring, etc. Our